Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  The housekeeper ducked her head a little, her brown eyes sad. "You mean other than Algeron Brackett?"

  There was momentary silence. "Yes," Kyra said softly. "Other than Algeron."

  Merrivale sighed. "I'm sorry, Miss Kyra. Maybe I shouldn't bring it up, with all else that's gone on—I'm fairly distracted, with all the flans and tarts to do again and the garlands still to be bought and woven up, and the price they want for them, too… But it breaks my heart, watching the pair of them. And what would be the harm of it, except that it's not what your father wants for her? The boy's as capable of fathering an heir for the business as Master Spenson, and if not… Well, there's always your cousin Wyrdlees, mooching about wiping his hands and asking what's in a dish before he eats it. He'd step into your father's shoes quick enough."

  "Yes," Kyra agreed. "If Father could stand being around him."

  "It's still no reason for your poor sister to be made miserable," the housekeeper said doughtily. "The merest tithe of her dowry would set up as fine a shop for making gowns as any in this city. You know how she sews, and her sense of style—she's better than that Hylette woman everyone makes such a fuss about and doesn't put on airs, neither. And once that sweet young man passes his guild examinations, he could start a pastry shop, which she'd run for him, him being no more suited to do his own bookkeeping than your mother's lapdogs."

  "Is Alix?" Kyra asked, curious.

  "Fit to run a shop? She's her father's daughter and her mother's, too—and your sister, miss. She may prattle on like a finch in a cage, but she knows what silk costs and where to get it cheaper and how to make a copper do the work of a crown. If she wasn't a fit seamstress, she certainly wouldn't be making her own gowns." She shook her head and pushed back her linen mobcap from her thin, fading hair. "Well, that's neither here nor there."

  "No," Kyra mused. "Not with Father hungry for a grandson who'll have connections to all the big merchant bankers in the city." She felt a twinge of guilt, knowing that it was her decision to become a wizard—to put herself beyond the dealings of business and marriage partnerships and dynastic alliances—that had made Alix the sole focus of all her father's hopes.

  "I know Cousin Wyrdlees offered marriage to me—not that I'd have touched him with a barge pole. Did he do so with Alix?"

  Merrivale chuckled. "If he did, it came to naught. Though for all he says about your cousin, I think your father's just holding it against him that Wyrdlees' mother married a mill owner rather than a broker or a merchant. The man's a good businessman when all's said. Besides, your father had his eye on Spens for a fair long time."

  Kyra settled back and clasped her hands around her updrawn knee. "Was Wyrdlees angry at being cut out?"

  Merrivale finished another line of beautiful penmanship requesting the honor of the receiver's company at the Church of St. Creel in Great Cheevy Street and replaced the quill in the plain brass standish. "Well, he's known all his life your father didn't much care for the thought of making him his heir… as you know, miss. My thought is that's why he's got himself betrothed to Belissa Millpott. And as for others being angry…" She shrugged.

  "Well, of course there were any number of your father's friends, aye, and competitors, too: merchants and brokers who'd hoped to put together a match with her with sons of theirs. Aye, and not just because she's your father's heiress, either. She's a taking girl is Miss Alixenia. There was a spark or two from Court, either hanging out for an heiress or who just fancied her. The Viscount March had a tendre for her—used to send her nosegays after the dances at the Guildhall—and of course the Viscount Frayne tried his best to make her think it was her he loved and not her dowry."

  "Young man with spots on his chin and a receding hairline?"

  "That's the one."

  Kyra sniffed. "And no line of conversation, either. No wonder Alix would have nothing to do with him."

  She was silent for a time, thinking. From the kitchen came a burst of laughter at one of the harpsichord player's jokes and Lily squeaking, "Aye, well, it's no wonder the four of you got run out of Senterwing." The laundrywoman replaced one iron on the stove's central grill and hooked the handle into another, and the soft thump of her work resumed with a monotonous regularity, like the slowly-beating heart of a dying man.

  "And none of those competitors—those merchants and brokers—have done anything to try to… to scupper the match? To prevent the alliance of our house with that of the Spensons?"

  "Good heavens!" Merrivale looked up at her in genuine surprise. Then, considering it, "Well, it's something your father would be likelier to know than I, miss. I know Fyster Nyven suspects that everything Lord Mayor Spenson does is aimed at putting him in the poorhouse, and vice versa, and of course the Brecksnifts did their best to get their daughter married to Spens— Master Spenson, that is—and were killed with outrage when the match was announced, but they aren't the only ones who wanted that alliance." Her fair, sparse brows tweaked down over her eyes. "Why ask all this, miss?"

  "No reason," Kyra said. Then, after an artistic hesitation, "Well, it's just that I saw someone lurking in the street outside the house this morning," she said truthfully. "He had the air of someone watching the place. It may have had nothing at all to do with Alix's wedding."

  "Belike," Merrivale murmured, frowning. "On the other hand, the way business is run in this town, you may be right to think there's some as would try to disrupt the match. And even if he's not, with the house nearly empty on the morn of the wedding, it's always a temptation for thieves. I'll have Trobe take a look around."

  Almost as good as sleet, Kyra thought. The groom, if he was the one she was thinking of, was very large.

  "And Algeron himself?" she asked a little awkwardly. "He wouldn't… try to stop the match himself, would he?"

  Merrivale's brown eyes grew both sad and just a little amused. "Well, he loves her. But he'd be more like to do himself an injury, sinking into a decline and writing sonnets about it. She's the one I worry about the more."

  "Do you?" Kyra's voice grew suddenly sharp, and she lowered it again to exclude the laundrywoman.

  "Poor thing." The older woman shook her head and dipped her pen again. "Well, there's many that come to love after their first child's born, and she'll not do him wrong. And why wouldn't a man who's just returned from years of taking ships to heathen parts welcome quiet and wealth and running the guild, and a lovely new wife in the bargain? He's thirty-seven, after all, and the only heir to his father's affairs. High time he came back and settled down."

  She paused in her writing and patted Kyra's hand comfortingly. "There, now. She's a sensible girl is Alix. She'll come through it all fine. She's always been one as to control her feelings."

  Control them? Kyra thought, remembering the glitter of tears in candlelight. Or hide them from herself as well as from others?

  The housekeeper sighed and drew another sheet of finely-pressed vellum paper to her, glancing at the scribbled formula of the announcement. "Myself, I'll just be glad when this is all over."

  "That will be two of us." Kyra sighed and, gathering her skirts in hand, returned to the back stairs and started the long ascent to the yellow guest chamber once again. It had been an extremely tiring day.

  Chapter VIII

  Kyra left the house well before first light, after a night of anxious dreams. In her worn cloak and the maid's plain blue frock, she blended into the shadowy ranks of men, women, and children in rags who made up the sluggish stream flowing southward toward the factories on the river's banks, people about whom, before she became a mage, Kyra had seldom troubled to think at all.

  They had been driven off the farmlands by landlords who'd gone over to sheep rearing or large-field tillage or were the children of those who had; they worked for a few coppers a day and slept three and four families to a room in the slums of St. Cyr and Seven Ways. They shivered in their rags, though Kyra, used to the bitter cold of the Sykerst, was far from uncomfortable. White, undernourished fa
ces swam up around Kyra through the soot-laden fog, troubling her like unanswered questions, for she was well aware that without the factories, no maidservant in Angelshand would have been able to have two gowns, one to be worn while the other was mended or washed or pilfered by her master's daughter for incognito excursions to questionable portions of the town.

  At the Citadel such questions never arose.

  No wonder, she thought, coughing as the raw smoke in the air filed at her throat and lungs, the mages chose to retreat, to declare themselves incapable of judging right and wrong. Perhaps these days right and wrong didn't exist, in politics and money, anyway.

  And it was certainly no business of the Inquisition's to judge.

  The subject of the Inquisition still rankled, for it had cost her some trouble to slip past the Witchfinders who, she was certain, still watched the house.

  Fortunately, as she fretted through last night's endless hours, her mind and senses had roved through the darkened house between her bouts of dreams, and whispered conversations had come down to her from the attic. "Aye, he's gone over to the house next door,' she heard the mandolin player tell someone in his drawling voice, and the sight of the flute player standing in the postern to Neb Wishrom's kitchen yard returned to her. The Wishroms' scullery door, she recalled, opened not into their yard but into the alley behind. Whoever the flute player had trysted with at the Wishroms' had locked the cellar door behind him when he left, but an hour and a half later Kyra had no trouble slipping the latch and moving like a trail of smoke through the Wishroms' drying room and storage pantry through to their scullery and thence up the slippery stone steps of the areaway, looking for all the world like a servant sent to do early marketing.

  Her anxiety driving her on, she took a circuitous route first, fearing to use any magic to summon the fog more thickly about her or to veil herself from watching eyes. It was her pursuer's spell of Look-over-There, she remembered, that had flagged her attention the previous day. After six years absence she had to negotiate carefully through the narrow alleys that she'd pelted along so blindly as a child: Faggot Court, Upper Little Pinnikin Alley, Songbird Lane. Difficult, too, even with mageborn senses, to sort the breathing and footfalls of the silent, ragged ghosts who peopled these ways at this hour: prostitutes and mill workers, cab drivers and court rakes and hungry university students rambling home from nights in the taverns or the stews.

  In time she satisfied herself that she was not being pursued. From there she hurried, straight as a bee to water, to the Cheevy Street Baths.

  Though Kyra had lived in Angelshand until the age of eighteen, she had never before visited one of the city's public baths. The experience, particularly at this hour of the morning, was an instructive one, since the half hour before sunup was the favored time for prostitutes coming off work. Evidently the young Court rakes were aware of this fact, too, and Kyra had a number of offers as she edged her way through the brightly dressed groups among the massive red pillars of the portico.

  Once inside, she was interested to notice that two or three of the women who shared the deep, marble-sided tub with her were wreathed in faint clouds of illusion, a cheap but intriguing spell designed to remind a male beholder of someone unattainable but deeply desired. Somewhere in the city some dog wizard was putting his powers to unexpected use, and had Kyra not been intent on the task she needed to accomplish—and on remaining unnoticed herself—she would have immediately asked the women about it from sheer academic curiosity.

  So there was a dog wizard operating in the neighborhood, she thought, drawing her cloak more closely around her shoulders to shield her wet hair from the cold as she left the place nearly an hour later. After the official purges two years ago, he—or she—would be difficult to track, but it would have to be done, and done soon. It would be easier, she thought, than combing through every room in the house in search of an Eye of Evil through which to track first the wizard and then the man or woman who had paid to have the curse placed.

  Besides, she thought, even if there was no connection with her sister at all, the other juniors would kill her if she didn't further her inquires about those spells.

  "Miss Peldyrin!"

  She turned sharply, startled. Almost eerily quiet an hour ago, Fennel Street was now moderately sprinkled with clerks hurrying to the countinghouses of the harbor and servants making their way to market while the vegetables were still fresh from the fields. With the coming of the sun and the thinning of the mists, even these grimed brown tenements and gray granite paving blocks had taken on color and life. The blind hurdy-gurdy player had established himself on a yellow blanket at the corner of Proggin Alley, and a woman selling straw charms and Hands of God was crying her wares in a faint aura of tobacco smoke and sesame oil.

  Behind her Kyra saw Blore Spenson at the reins of his light one-horse chaise. He had called out to her, so it was too late to make him think she was a scarf seller or somebody's maid.

  "Thank you." She strode back to him and climbed in, hanging up the flounce of her petticoat on the step. "I was afraid I'd miss breakfast."

  Spenson laughed and flicked the reins; he might, she realized a few moments later, have had some other destination in mind than her father's house, but if so, he let it go gracefully and concentrated on steering around a cab driver who'd pulled up in the middle of Bent Hill Lane to buy breakfast from a woman selling muffins from a cart.

  "I hope you riding with me means you forgive me. For setting your father at you," he added, glancing briefly at the baffled expression on her face and then turning his attention back to avoiding a butcher's wagon and two court sedan chairs complete with bodyguards—not needed in daylight but a necessity if one were setting out for the gambling hells of Algoswive district at two in the morning. "I never meant to do that."

  "Oh, don't take credit for anything extraordinary," Kyra said lightly, feeling the back of her hood where the damp had soaked through from her hair. "Father's been set against me from the day I took vows not to meddle in mundane affairs. I think he'd have been perfectly happy for me to be a dog wizard and put good words on his account books." He drove well, she observed, his touch on the reins as light as it had been on her hand yesterday, and such unexpected hazards as small dogs and two urchins rolling a hoop along the pavement did not seem to take him by surprise. But presumably neither had pirates, Oriental potentates, or irate sea-island natives.

  "Would he?" Her prospective brother-in-law glanced sidelong at her, and she saw his fair, level brows bunch. "It didn't sound like he had much use for dog wizards. I know he's run them out of this neighborhood. As you know," he added awkwardly.

  "Ah." Kyra's smile was tight. "You're thinking of Tibbeth of Hale."

  "He was burned, wasn't he?" The deliberate neutrality of his tone—the setting of the event at a distance— surprised her. He was the only person besides Alix who seemed to realize that mention of the scandal might still cause her pain. And, she thought, he'd seen through her airy lie about her father's attitude toward her magic—not a piece of perception she'd have credited to the stiff and silent man who'd had so little to say at dinner. "I'd shipped as supercargo on the Inzibar Queen" he went on. "Her maiden voyage, out through the Tarand Straits; she's still one of our best merchantmen. It was all over by the time I returned."

  It occurred to Kyra that if she had had Lord Mayor Spenson for a father, she'd have gone to sea as well.

  "Well," she remarked lightly, "the trial did have something to do with my decision to embrace the Academic variety of wizardry, which at least protects its adherents from the vagaries of public opinion."

  "Wasn't he your teacher?"

  She shrugged. "For a time."

  She was aware of his glance touching her profile again and had the uneasy feeling that he saw through her flippancy to the scars beneath. Her eyes were scanning the streets around them, looking for places that her attention persistently skipped—so far, nothing seemed to be pushing away her gaze. On the balconies of t
he houses of rose and golden brick, maidservants were airing bed linen; a religious procession passed down the pavement on the opposite side, the monks in the blue robes of the Hilatian Order walking in a chanting chain, each man's hand on the shoulder of the man before him, all blindfolded while the flute player who led them piped shrilly to drown out unholy sounds and unholy thoughts. Spenson's horse flung up her head and snorted in disgust at the incense.

  "I owe you two apologies, really," Spenson said after a straitened silence, "and thanks. Because you were right. I was having—dreams…" He could barely get the word out, and his face had gone rufous again. "… about the Earthwygg girl." His blue eyes met hers squarely, as if daring her to speak of the matter, and Kyra, who was about to observe that there was nothing to be embarrassed about except perhaps the implication that he might find Esmin Earthwygg attractive without the aid of magic, realized that he was highly embarrassed.

  So she said instead, and in a quieter voice than her usual half-ironic tone, "Well, considering the state of that family's finances, it's hardly surprising her mother would try something of the kind on you. She must have been spitting blood when the betrothal was announced."

  Spenson looked startled. "I hardly know the girl!"

  "Good heavens, you don't think that had anything to do with it, do you? You hardly know my sister."

  He turned his attention back to his driving, and for some time he seemed to be intently studying the mare's ears. His mouth settled into the hard line it sometimes had in Alix's presence, and the color was long in fading from his cheeks.

  Kyra wondered how vivid the dreams had been.

  After a time he said, "I know the difference between a woman who'll make a man a good wife and one who won't."

  Hearing the world of discomfit in his voice, she picked her words carefully. "Believe me, you're no more to blame than if—than if someone had put a Get-Lost spell on your carriage and you'd been four hours late for dinner. Spells like that have absolutely nothing to do with their subject's real desires."